


Does this count as mercy?

by Zoadgo



Series: Merry Ficmas! [1]
Category: Z Nation (TV)
Genre: Alternate Canon, Enemies to Lovers, F/M, Vasquez doesn't join the group right away
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-21
Updated: 2015-12-21
Packaged: 2018-05-08 06:11:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,421
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5486555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zoadgo/pseuds/Zoadgo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Warren has a hard enough time attempting to catch Murphy, competing with an frustratingly attractive bounty hunter doesn’t make things any easier.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Does this count as mercy?

Tracking and attempting to capture the annoyingly slippery potential saviour of the human race is difficult enough for Warren and her team. The bounty on his head drawing every bounty hunter and opportunistic survivor in the area to him complicates things, as does his small force of mind-controlled zombies, but neither of them nearly so much as one bounty hunter in particular; a frustratingly skilled and persistent man by the name of Vasquez who always seems to manage to show up, throw a wrench in Warren’s plans, and slip away again, no matter what her and her team do.

Warren is desperately hoping that he won’t show up as she paces the debris ridden streets of the latest town they’d managed to track Murphy to, but she has very little actual hope in that regards. If they’d managed to find this latest hiding spot, doubtlessly the bounty hunter had, too. No matter if he is there, by whatever supernatural tracking abilities he has, Warren is confident in her team, scattered throughout the town. They’ll get Murphy, kill his Z bodyguards, and deal with any inconveniences that get in their way. 

The downfall of society and subsequent disrepair of towns often works against survivors, shelters no longer providing the protection they once had, and crumbling brickwork and cement causing silent passage to become a lot more difficult. Normally, Warren ends up cursing the obstacles present in every town that cause her or her team to draw attention to themselves on accident. Today, however, when a boot crunching a pile of concrete fragments in an alley that she’s just out of sight of the entrance of alerts her to a potential threat within it, she’s thankful for the crumbling buildings.

Warren approaches the alley slowly, hugging the side of the building that makes one side of it as the regular footsteps sounding in the almost still air mark the occupant of the passageway as someone living. Her machete is silent to hand, and Warren choses her position carefully as she waits for whoever is in the alleyway - not one of her own people, she knows their paces too well - to emerge. The first black toe of a boot creeps into her field of vision, and as an overly familiar body follows it, Warren moves.

With surprise on her side, it doesn’t take that much effort for Warren to pin the man to the wall, forcing him backwards in a quick move and using her machete to lever the rifle from his grip before pressing the sharp blade to his throat. Vasquez almost fights back, and Warren presses a warning into the tender skin under his jaw. He raises his hands beside his head in a surrender, a small smile forming infuriatingly on his lips.

“You again.” Warren is not smiling, and her disdain for the bounty hunter who has once again shown up carries in her voice.

“You don’t sound surprised.” His reply is casual, so much so that it only serves to make Warren more frustrated with him. How can someone sound so calm with a blade to their neck?

“Not much point in being surprised, these days. Lets people get the drop on you.” Warren nods her head slightly at where her machete is pressed to his neck, and the man simply quirks an eyebrow along with his smile.

“I’ll give you that one, you’re quick. But do you think you’re quick enough to secure me and manage to get the Murphy before he escapes? I’m willing to bet he already knows we’re here, he’s a paranoid blue bastard.” Vasquez’s tone, as always, seems to carry a hint of condescension, which only makes it more annoying that he usually turns out to be right.

“My team will get him just fine, and I can catch up with them after disposing of you.” Warren shifts her blade on his neck and half-growls the words in a tone that has made bigger men than Vasquez obey her, hoping to intimidate him, but apparently failing, as he simply continues to smile.

“You’re not going to kill me, Warren.” Damned if Warren doesn’t almost slit his throat right there, simply for him suggesting she wouldn’t. But she reigns in her temper, reminding herself that the mission is useless if there’s no humans left to save, even annoying bounty hunters.

“That’s Lieutenant to you, only my people get to call me Warren.”

“Sure thing, Lieutenant. But that doesn’t change the fact that we both know you’re going to let me go.” Something in the way he says it makes the title seem less like an honorific and more like a teasing nickname that Warren immediately regrets having requested Vasquez call her.

“And you don’t know a damn thing about me, or you’d know I have no issue giving mercy to the living as well as the dead.” She would rather not mercy him, actually, but he has no need to know that. Fear of death often causes people to behave better than actually killing them does, and as Vasquez had pointed out back in Cheyenne, there are more than enough zombies in the world and precious few humans.

She can practically feel the smart-ass reply in the movement of Vasquez’s chest as he inhales, and she moves before he can actually phrase it. Her blade falls from his neck, but rises again in the next moment and bashes into his skull with a thud that is at the same time satisfying and sickening. Vasquez crumples to the ground as rapid footsteps come around the corner, and Warren looks up from his unconscious form to see Addy approaching, shaking her head when Warren sees her.

“We lost him, he’s headed West.” 

Warren shakes her head as Addy confirms what she’d been worried about, putting her machete away and walking away from Vasquez. She vaguely considers taking his weapons and ammo, but leaving him in a Z infested town is mean enough without leaving him defenceless. 

Addy glances over at Vasquez as Warren passes her, “He still alive?”

“Just going to have one hell of a bump on his head later. Let’s go.” Addy follows Warren’s impatient command and they leave Vasquez lying next to a pile of debris.

“At least you didn’t hit him in the face.” At Warren’s exasperated glare, Addy just shrugs, “What? Even you have to admit he’s cute.”

Warren definitely does not want to consider the bounty hunter as anything but annoying, so she simply denies it as Addy smiles to herself and drops the subject. Warren does admit to herself, silently and in a tiny corner of her mind, that hitting him in the face would have been pointless on top of less than desirable.

\--

Tracking Murphy isn’t the hard part of the mission, Warren realizes as their near capture count continues to climb higher and higher, without anything to show for it. The guy leaves a trail of strangely dressed and acting zombies behind him, so obvious any idiot could follow it. Well, apparently not any idiot, as most of the frenzy of bounty hunting seems to have died down, the initial, poorly thought out announcement from Citizen Z being forgotten, and distance proving to be a great deterrent to all but one intrepid apocalypse entrepreneur.

No, the most difficult part of their job is the fact that Murphy seems to have developed a knack for building roadblocks of zombies that the team has to fight their way through, slowing them down and causing a few too many close calls for Warren’s liking. Some days she wonders if it might not be best to simply let Murphy go his own way, but she silences those thoughts quickly. At least if she catches him, she’ll make sure he’s treated fairly. There’s no telling what will go down if someone else gets a hold of him.

Warren and the team are exhausted from having dealt with one such inconvenience when they come across another small, decrepit town. Exactly the place that Murphy seems to love hiding, so the team splits up, Addy and Doc taking side streets to the left and right of the main boulevard, and 10k sprinting off ahead and darting into a building to climb to the rooftops with an enviable energy. 

Warren takes the main street, hugging the walls and walking quickly with her handgun drawn, luck in finding ammo a while back making it more than a poorly weighted club finally. She has a feeling that Murphy’s here, something in the feel of the town screams it to her. Maybe it’s the fact that they ran into zombies not too long ago, yet there aren’t any wandering the streets, or maybe it’s simply intuition. Either way, when she sees a blue face peek out from between two buildings, spot her, and turn back into the alleyway rapidly, she’s unsurprised and takes off after Murphy at a run.

She ducks into the pedestrian walkway between the buildings just in time to see Murphy’s garish outfit turn onto a side street. Warren hears Murphy shouting orders to Cassandra, oddly not to attack his pursuer, but to run ahead of him, and though it confuses her, Warren doesn’t let it throw her off. She knows she’s faster than Murphy, and if it had just been her pursuing him, she would have caught him or run him into her team with no issues.

As is, Warren rounds another corner just in time to see Vasquez step out from another street, his rifle trained on Murphy’s legs. A difficult shot, but a necessary one considering they don’t know what will kill him or not. Also a shot that Warren can’t allow him to take, however. Even though Murphy is a fugitive, their escaped captive, Warren still views him as one of her own, and she’ll be damned if she lets someone shoot him.

Vasquez, apparently caught up in lining up his shot, doesn’t notice Warren as she adjusts her course ever so slightly in order to slam into him, tackling him to the ground. She hears the air leave his lungs as he hits the ground with her on top of him, and she aims her gun at his forehead before he has a chance to regain his breath and retaliate. Just like last time, though, Vasquez doesn’t even try to fight back when he sees her, simply coughs through a few breaths as he recovers, then quirks his lips in half a smile at her.

“You know I said I’d kill any damn bounty hunter that got in my way, right?” Warren threatens, tapping the barrel of her gun to his skin.

“Well, it seems to me like you’ve removed me from your way, Lieutenant.” He’s still smirking, and it might be attractive if it weren’t so damn annoying. “And let our quarry escape.”

Warren follows the flick of his eyes to where Murphy had been with a quick glance, not giving him the opportunity to distract and overpower her. Although she doesn’t want to kill him, considering he’s never tried to kill her or any of her people, Warren doesn’t delude herself into thinking that Vasquez won’t free himself the second he has the chance. But of course he’s simply telling the truth, and the blue bastard is nowhere to be seen, and Warren roughly releases Vasquez with a frustrated grunt.

“You know, this is all your fault. If you’d just give up already, we’d stop having this problem.” Warren gestures at him with her pistol before pushing herself to her feet and sending up a brief prayer that 10K managed to secure Murphy while she was distracted. 

“That’s one thing you should know about me, if we’re both going to be cats to Murphy’s mouse. I never give up.” Vasquez shoots her a wink as he stands and sets off around the corner that Murphy likely disappeared around at a jog.

“That little son of a Z,” Warren mumbles to herself as she shakes her head and sets after him leisurely, confident Murphy’s either gone – again – or caught by one of her own people. It turns out to be the former, and Warren can’t say that she’s surprised.

\--

There seem to be three kinds of days that just repeat themselves in a cycle for Warren and her team, the details frequently unremarkable and indistinguishable. The most common days are those where nothing happens, maybe kill a few Zs, but mostly just walking or driving in search of hints. Then there are days where they think they’ve found Murphy, but it turns out they haven’t. Those are frustrating and often exhausting, because they usually involve a decoy horde of zombies for them to fight.

The third type of day is the rarest, and those are the ones in which they do find Murphy. They have yet to catch him, of course, because he has more luck than Doc, apparently, but even sighting him is becoming rarer as the days tick by. Those days, the near misses with success almost always include a run in with Vasquez. Warren thinks that under other circumstances she might appreciate his tenacity and perhaps even some of his more smart-ass qualities, but having him as a rival grows increasingly frustrating.

One of those rare days is provided to the group courtesy of a radio tip from Citizen Z, providing them with an exact location and warnings of his traps and decoys before the transmission cut out. They plan their infiltration accordingly, this time not dealing with a town, but with a series of warehouses. And this time, Warren plans for the eventuality that she runs into Vasquez, informing her team accordingly and ensuring that she plays no key role in capturing Murphy.

Warren accompanies her team to the edges of the massive steel buildings, and then she takes the route she would have if following the strategies they’d previously used. And as if summoned by her desire to be proven right, there’s Vasquez as she creeps between two of the buildings, moving quickly and confidently as if he knows everything the team does. And perhaps he does, if he has some way of eavesdropping on them, it would certainly explain a lot.

But this time, him being here and doing what Warren expects plays right into her hands. She detours around him, dashing past buildings in order to get to a point that she can cut him off at. She knows that one of these days she likely won’t get the drop on him, but hopefully that won’t be today. And if her plan goes well, they won’t be playing this little game in the future.

Warren’s machete is in hand again, but rather than risking the same move she’d used on him the first time she’d disarmed Vasquez, she waits for Vasquez to approach the intersection with the path she’s currently on, and then throws a fair sized rock at the side of one of the buildings up the other side of the path from her, aiming high and hopefully out of his line of sight. He doesn’t seem to see the rock, but as she’d hoped, he turns to check that side of the intersecting path first. It allows Warren a moment to step up behind him and slide her machete around to rest against his throat, her free arm sliding under his arm and around his torso to limit his movement. 

To his credit, Vasquez goes still, which Warren thinks is a totally appropriate reaction to having a sword against your throat. She angles it up to encourage him to tip his head back, then pulls the blade towards her a bit, making him lean back and throwing him slightly off balance. In this position, his back is pressed to Warren’s torso and it gives her a fair amount of control over him. She sees him glance at her out of the corner of his eyes, and there’s that smirk again.

“We’ve got to stop meeting like this, Lieutenant.”

“I’ll admit I didn’t think it would be this easy to get the drop on you so many times.” Without the knowledge that Murphy could be getting away due to her not playing a part in their capture of him, Warren finds herself enjoying the situation more. There’s something to be said for having an attractive man pressed against your chest, completely under your control. “Put your gun down.”

“Come on, we both know how this plays out, why don’t we just skip to the part where you let me go?” Vasquez’s tone is, once again, completely calm and almost seems to have friendly teasing in it. He does, however, slowly shift his hands on his rifle to place it on the ground, resting the butt of it in the dirt and then dropping it.

“You’re right, we do seem to have a pattern. Maybe it’s time we broke that,” Warren smiles, ready to do something to truly surprise Vasquez, and lowers her machete from his throat, sheathing it in the same motion.

Vasquez turns towards her with an eyebrow raised in confusion and quite likely a few questions, as she’s never given up on restraining him quite so easily, but Warren doesn’t let him ask them. She doesn’t let him say anything, actually, reaching up and grabbing the back of his neck in order to drag him closer to her and press her lips to his.

It takes less time than Warren had thought it would for Vasquez to respond, and good god, does he ever respond. His hands find her hips in an instant, his grip light for only a moment before tightening as his lips move against Warren’s and she bites at his lower lip. He sighs a groan against her lips and backs her into a metal wall with enough force that Warren sucks in a pleased breath at it. She’d always enjoyed the rougher side of things, and the apocalypse only seems to have increased her appetite for it.

Vasquez’s lips break from hers to rail down to her neck, and Warren feels teeth and shows her approval by sliding her hand up the back of his shirts and dragging her nails over his skin. Not enough force to break the skin from either of them, of course, but enough to leave marks for sure. Vasquez groans and rolls his hips against her, and Warren hums happily at the friction.

She’s about to flip them around, to force Vasquez up against the wall in a far more pleasurable manner than she has in the past, when a familiar voice calling her name completely breaks Warren out of that line of thought. She pushes Vasquez away in a heartbeat, just in time as Addy comes running up one of the intersecting paths and spots them.

“Hey, Warren, we got him!” Addy’s excitement is contagious and Warren responds with a smile before Addy takes in the fact that Vasquez is still quite close to Warren, his gun discarded on the ground, staring at Warren, “What’s happening here?”

Warren glances at Vasquez and it only takes her a second to come up with a response, but that second is enough for Addy’s smile to shift to something all-too knowing, and Warren knows she’ll never hear the end of it from her second-in-command.

“We were having a discussion. Vasquez has decided it’s in his best interest to come with us and take a share of the bounty, isn’t that right?” Warren levels a look at Vasquez that very heavily suggests all he should say is “Yes”, no elaboration on their current situation needed.

“Of course,” Vasquez shrugs and goes to retrieve his weapon, “a share is better than no bounty at all.”

“A discussion, really?” Addy’s tone implies that she knows exactly how much discussing was going on, and Warren simply sighs and starts walking towards her, clapping a hand on Addy’s shoulder when she reaches her and they start walking towards where she knows where the rest of the group is, trailing a suddenly very compliant Vasquez.

“That is all you need to know,” Warren can’t help but shoot Addy a small grin with that, and Addy’s own smile grows in response.

“You know if you ever wants to ‘discuss’ things some more, I’ll cover for you,” Addy says, more a statement than an offer. 

Warren throws a glance over her shoulder, “I may just have to take you up on that.”

**Author's Note:**

> Happy holidays, everyone! This is the first day of what I'm calling "Ficmas", which is going to end up being 12 brand new one shots for y'all to enjoy (3/day, one for each of my major fandoms each day from the 21st to the 24th)
> 
> I started this fic in the wake of the first episode of season 2, but hey, it works as an AU! I hope y’all enjoy it, Warren and Vasquez are so fucking great, I had to at least attempt something for them. Y’all should send [Etra](http://coldsaturn.tumblr.com) some love ‘cause she’s the best and edits my fics for shows she doesn’t even watch.
> 
> Come spend the holidays with me [on tumblr!](http://jonnmurphy.tumblr.com) And thank is advance for reading/commenting/leaving kudos <3


End file.
